Search form

About MDRC

Redcross is Deputy Director of MDRC’s Health and Barriers to Employment policy area. Her expertise is in random assignment evaluations of programs that serve individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Currently, Redcross is leading several projects evaluating interventions that target former prisoners and others involved in the justice system, including the U.S. Department of Labor’s multisite Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration and the National Institute of Justice’s Demonstration Field Experiment: What Works in Reentry Research. She is also leading a demonstration of a new employment-focused cognitive behavioral therapy intervention and is the deputy director of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Building Bridges and Bonds project, which is testing the effectiveness of innovative strategies for working with low-income and disadvantaged fathers. Previously, she has served as project manager and research lead for other MDRC prisoner reentry studies, including the Center for Employment Opportunities evaluation, the multisite Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration, and the Rikers Island Jail Single Stop evaluation. Since joining MDRC in 1996, she has served as task lead on several large-scale random assignment evaluations. Redcross has authored or coauthored a number of published reports and journal articles. She began her career as a researcher for the New York State Assembly. She holds an M.S. in sociology with a focus on urban affairs.

MDRC Publications

In this article originally published in Policy & Practice magazine, MDRC’s Dan Bloom and Cindy Redcross offer lessons from successful collaborations to improve employment and other outcomes for reentering prisoners and noncustodial parents.

A training program for parole officers in Dallas, Denver, and Des Moines sought to address the persistently high recidivism rates among individuals leaving prison. This study’s results show that officers generally already knew many of the curriculum’s concepts, and changes to their practices were limited.

“Transitional jobs” are temporary, subsidized jobs meant to teach participants basic work skills or help them get started with an employer. The Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration tested seven such programs for people recently released from prison or low-income parents behind on child support. This report presents the final impact results.

Defendants awaiting trial and unable to post bail are often detained in local jails unnecessarily, disrupting their lives and adding to costs for taxpayers. To address this situation, New York City has launched a program that gives judges the option to release some defendants to community-based supervision.

This demonstration is testing seven enhanced transitional jobs programs that offer temporary, subsidized jobs and comprehensive support to people recently released from prison and unemployed parents behind in child support payments.

An earlier MDRC evaluation found that the original Center for Employment Opportunities transitional jobs program reduced the rates at which important subgroups of participants committed new crimes or were reincarcerated. The current evaluation finds that five new replication programs have implemented the model faithfully.

Ex-prisoners who had access to CEO’s transitional jobs program were less likely to be convicted of a crime and reincarcerated. The effects were particularly large for those ex-prisoners who enrolled in the program shortly after release. The recidivism reductions mean that the program is cost-effective — generating more in savings than it cost.

The Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration is testing a program that provides temporary subsidized jobs, support services, and job placement help to former prisoners in four midwestern cities. This report describes how the demonstration was implemented and assesses how the transitional jobs programs affected employment and recidivism during the first year after people entered the project.

CEO, a transitional jobs program for former prisoners in New York City, had its strongest effects for participants who were at highest risk of recidivism, for whom CEO reduced the probability of rearrest, the number of rearrests, and the probability of reconviction two years after entering the program.

This report examines the financial benefits and costs of three different programs in the national Employment Retention and Advancement project, sponsored by the federal Administration for Children and Families, that have increased employment and earnings among current and former welfare recipients.

Interim results from an evaluation of two different welfare-to-work strategies for long-term welfare recipients show that transitional jobs increase employment and earnings but that it is difficult to successfully engage participants in extensive pre-employment services.

A random assignment study shows that participants in CEO’s transitional jobs program were less likely to be convicted of a crime, to be admitted to prison for a new conviction, or to be incarcerated for any reason in prison or jail over the first two years. The program also had a large but short-lived impact on employment.

After one year, CEO’s transitional jobs program generated a large but short-lived increase in employment for ex-prisoners. A subgroup of recently released prisoners showed positive effects on recidivism: They were less likely to have their parole revoked, to be convicted of a felony, and to be reincarcerated than the control group.

Recognizing that welfare recipients who find jobs may remain poor, the “make work pay” approach rewards those who work by boosting their income. This strategy was the centerpiece of the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP), a large-scale demonstration program in Canada that offered monthly earnings supplements to single parents who left welfare for full-time work.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement launched the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration to test the efficacy of incorporating procedural justice principles into child support practices

Cognitive-behavioral approaches have proven effective in promoting change in areas such as criminal behavior and substance abuse in hundreds of studies over the past 25 years. Cognitively focused approaches take aim at thoughts and beliefs that undermine mental health and turn the focus toward solutions.

Fathers play a unique role in their children’s lives and development, but some fathers face personal or societal barriers to positive involvement with their children — such as low levels of education, stigma from criminal records, declining wages for low-skilled men, or family instability.

With 750,000 people released from prisons each year, there is a pressing need for rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of reentry strategies. Former prisoners face a range of challenges to successful reentry into the community, including low levels of employment and substance abuse problems, all of which impact recidivism rates.

The more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year face a range of obstacles to successful reentry into the community. Perhaps not surprisingly, outcomes are often poor: Two-thirds of those who are released from prison are rearrested and half are reincarcerated within three years.

The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. has quadrupled since the 1970s. The more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year face a range of obstacles to successful reentry into the community.

In the past three decades, broad economic shifts have sharply decreased the availability of good jobs for workers without postsecondary education. Disadvantaged men have been particularly hard hit by these trends.

The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), an initiative enacted under the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act, targets millions of dollars in public-private funds to expand effective solutions across three issue areas: economic opportunity, healthy futures, and youth development and school support.

Over the past 80 years, a variety of subsidized employment strategies have been used for two main purposes: (1) to provide work-based income support for people who are not able to find regular, unsubsidized jobs; and (2) to improve the employability of disadvantaged groups.